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Ethan Estess had an idea. A bit of a crappy idea one could say unless one had a wild outside of the box THIS IS GENIUS idea. Ethan did.

Ethan dug dirt. More specifically, Ethan dug digging around garbage yards. Been there done that. I got this guy. I used to dig around a garbage yard owned by my dad’s golfing crony. We would go and be let loose in the junkyard to explore. We knew boundaries. We knew adventure. We knew imagination. Eventually, our junkyard findings were transformed into treasures at home into things a kids head could imagine. Now, that said, I grew up in a home filled with stabiles. I even recall seeing a life size horse made out of horseshoes welded together.

All these years later, I am envious of Ethan’s love of trash. And I miss Leon’s metallurgical scientific site. Everything needs a fancy name doesn’t it? Enough letters, Leon, my dad’s friend, made owning a trash site respectable… well, almost unpronounceable.

Recology San Francisco, a waste management company picks and provides the artists with scavenging rights at the San Francisco Trash Transfer station, paying artists to make beauty from throwaway. The Artist-In-Residence program wants the artists to recycle throwaway in to Art. Studio space is a shipping container. Nothing to sneeze at in that in Asia shipping containers, to some are homes, their palaces.

You can meet Ethan here http://www.ethanestess.com/ Scavenging has made Ethan a bit of a philosopher in a peer world of Social Networking, a student of human predilection to buy and overbuy: “When you dig through people’s trash on the scale of a landfill, you realize that it’s the result of collective decisions. we choose what products to buy and we choose how to discard them.” … any tossed away relationships found in the trash, guys?